Magix Movie Edit Pro 11

When watching home movies growing up, who didn’t wish that Uncle Doug could have trimmed the boring sections from his reel and snazzed it up a bit with titles and effects.

Well, Uncle Doug, we’ve found your tool: Magix Movie Edit Pro 11 is affordable, fairly powerful, and contains enough cheese-filled effects and transitions that we had to check the box to see if the developers were from Wisconsin.

Our dairy favorite? The ability to overlay animated objects that look like leftovers from an episode of Blind Date.

OK, we’re being a little hard on Movie Edit Pro 11. For a $60 program, you do get an awful lot of functionality, and not all of it is sharp cheddar. In fact, we’d rate some of the transitions and effects higher than those included with more upscale editing packages from Adobe and Pinnacle. The on-the-fly audio and easy to use color correction deliver functionality not present in other packages. Although Movie Edit Pro claims to support writing “HD discs,” it’s only in the poorly-supported WMV HD format, not true Blu-ray or HD-DVD formats.

Editing high-def camcorder footage was painfully slow on our Athlon 64 FX-60 system. Simply rearranging footage left the system noticeably pokey. The timeline editor obscured basic tasks such as splicing scenes and trimming footage. We didn’t find the editing interface to be as intuitive as Pinnacle’s or Adobe’s consumer video editors. The title editor qualifies as bare-bones—without a wide color palette or font selection.

But the truth is that most people who use Movie Edit Pro 11 will never shift into timeline mode. They’ll just add the pre-fab transitions and effects, then click the burn button. For Uncle Doug, who just wants to add a Viking hat to a character or two, and maybe add some color and shake correction, Magix Movie Edit Pro 11 offers more than enough power and is a hell of a deal too.